Finance

Photo: ITDP Africa/Flickr
The World Bank Group (WBG) is currently implementing a new approach to development finance that will help better support our poverty reduction and shared prosperity goals. This crucial effort, dubbed Maximizing Finance for Development (MFD), seeks to leverage the private sector and optimize the use of scarce public resources to finance development projects in a way that is fiscally, environmentally, and socially sustainable.

There are several reasons why cities and transport planners should pay close attention to the MFD approach. First, while the need for sustainable urban mobility is greater than ever before, the available financing is nowhere near sufficient—and the financing gap only grows wider when you consider the need for climate change adaptation and mitigation. At the same time, worldwide investment commitments in transport projects with private participation have fallen in the last three years and currently stand near a 10-year low. When private investment does go to transport, it tends to be largely concentrated in higher income countries and specific subsectors like ports, airports, and roads. Finally, there is a lot of private money earning low yields and waiting to be invested in good projects. The aspiration is to try to get some of that money invested in sustainable urban mobility.

Last week, on April 20th, Matt Damon, co-founder of Water.org, addressed ministers of finance, water, and sanitation from across the world at the Sanitation and Water for All (SWA) Finance Ministers’ High Level Meeting at the 2017 World Bank-IMF Spring Meetings. The meeting focused on finding ways to fill the enormous financing gap via innovative financial solutions. Mr. Damon urged ministers to consider the full breadth of financing options to achieve the goal of providing safe, affordable, and sustainable water and sanitation for all.

Photo: Sarah Farhat/World Bank.
Ugandan’s access to financial services has improved dramatically in recent years. More than half of Uganda’s adult population now has access to an account at a formal financial institution. This is almost twice as many as in 2009. The entry and fast penetration of mobile money is the main reason for the increase, having allowed 8 million Ugandans to conduct financial transactions.

President of Hungary János Áder (left), President of Mauritius Ameenah Gurib-Fakim (middle) and Guangzhe CHEN, Senior Director for World Bank Water Global Practice (left) hosting a press conference at the Budapest Water Summit 2016.

One of the biggest hurdles is the lack of sufficient sources of finance. Financing the SDG sub-targets for water supply and sanitation alone will cost triple historic financing levels - an estimated $114 billion per year between now and 2030. The shortfall for financing irrigation and water resource management sub-targets will likely be as large, if not larger.

Local governments are under pressure to provide more and better services. But in most cases, they cannot do this alone. An examination of the World Bank Group’s PPI database and the PPP databases of some key countries reveals that while there is a preponderance of larger public-private partnerships (PPPs), several small-scale PPPs with promising results have also been undertaken, especially at sub-national levels of government and by autonomous bodies affiliated with governments.

The PPI database suggests that approximately 40 percent of all projects are valued at less than $50 million, and approximately 25 percent of all projects are less than $25 million (Figure below). However, the database misses out on projects in several emerging sectors at the sub-national level. While non-traditional sectors are captured in country and sub-national databases, few of these databases are readily available in the public domain.
Source: Ahmad, A. and Shukla, S., A Preliminary Review of Trends in Small-Scale Public-Private Partnerships, World Bank Group 2014.

The private sector continues to be a critical driver of job creation and economic growth. However, several factors can undermine the private sector and, if left unaddressed, may impede development. Through extensive face-to-face interviews with managers and owners of firms, the World Bank Group's Enterprise Surveys benchmark the business environment based on actual experiences of firms. A series of blogs, starting today, share the findings from recently analyzed surveys conducted in several countries.

The Namibia Enterprise Surveys consisted of 580 interviews with firms across three regions and three business sectors – manufacturing, retail, and other services. So what are some key highlights from the surveys?

Exports take on average 8 days to clear through customs but varies according to firm size
In 2013, it took a firm in Namibia about eight days to clear exports through customs, which is considerably more than the two days it took in 2006. Despite this increase, the average time to clear direct exports through customs is still about the same as in the upper middle income countries (8 days) and lower than the Sub-Saharan Africa regional average (10 days). Moreover, there is a wide variation across firm size. For a small firm, it takes about 17 days on average to clear exports through customs, compared to around six days for medium-sized firms and about two days for large firms.

Clearing imports, in contrast, through customs is considerably faster in Namibia (five days) than the average for upper middle income countries (11 days) and Sub-Saharan Africa average (17 days).

Because public finances are overstretched, governments must consider alternative financing models to leverage private capital into infrastructure, along with strategic use of International Financial Institutions (IFI) financing to crowd in private investments. At the same time, developments in global financial markets are fundamentally reshaping how capital is transmitted and invested around the world, including in infrastructure. A key element of attracting private sector debt and equity into infrastructure is to make the underlying transactions commercially viable through clear, transparent Financial Viability Support (FVS) mechanisms.

During the past few years, our Singapore-based team has spent significant time exploring the way that FVS mechanisms can make a difference in PPPs around the world. In the new issue of Partnerships IQ, we discuss in great detail how FVS is being implemented across the globe, and its potential for even greater impact. Here, we’d like to discuss FVS a little more broadly, introducing our ideas for how and where it might operate most efficiently.

Indonesia’s strategy to become one of the 10 major world economies by 2025 – part of a long-term program outlined in its Masterplan for Acceleration and Expansion of Indonesia's Economic Development (MP3EI) – relies heavily on how quickly it can build new infrastructure to support its rapid growth. This entails cooperation among the central government, local governments, state owned enterprises, and the private sector. Of the four parties, according to experts on the ground, “the private sector has a vital role to play in this masterplan (in the form of PPP schemes), as it is expected to contribute the bulk of financing.”

The World Bank at World Water Week 2015
​As the global focus shifts to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and achieving universal access to water and sanitation, there will clearly be a need to mobilize private capital to help finance the necessary infrastructure. The Global Water Practice at the World Bank has been working with key public and private sector partners in over ten countries to mobilize domestic credit and address operating inefficiencies which negatively impact on the delivery of water and sanitation. To scale up (“billions to trillions”) it will be necessary to consider the incentives needed to attract and sustain such capital flows.